The Romulan Republic wrote:
The torpedo performance was embarrassing. By all rights, they should have been able to glass the base and everything for a few miles around with that one hit, going off of the old numbers. Unless we presume they were using weaker munitions to prevent collateral damage, which I suppose is possible.

They may have had some major political reasons to do that, though this would be rather iffy given the desire to kill a high value target they had no rational reason to think would be standing on the landing platform.

But on the plus side for Star Wars debaters... wasn't their a Trek argument, back in the day, that the Death Star blast worked by means other than raw firepower, such as a chain reaction? Shouldn't the detailed footage of the blasts undermine that?

Sorta yes, sorta no, because while the large scale mass ejection demands a high energy imput, the fact that it's moving so slow raises major problems with the idea that the beam is a pure thermal-KE weapon subject to simplistic calculation. A slow moving chain reaction is actually a somewhat compliant idea with how you might get such a slow moving blast wave. However we'll need a blu-ray exam to find out how slow slow actually is, and we never see the blast finish so we cannot judge the true crater depth or how much of the effect was induced from the direct blast and how much was from the rebound of the impact.

Course Alderaan blewup at up to 10% of the speed of light, so end of the day it changes nothing in practical terms for the actual effectiveness of the Death Star. It does suggest that scaling anything about other SW capabilities based on the Death Star is dubious, but I've long felt that way a long time anyway because we don't know anything useful about how turbolasers work in the first place and thus how they might scale. Are all bolts the same except for scale, or does say, velocity serious affect the behavior like it does for real life ammunition. Do turbolasers have proof limits? Don't know, but it'd matter a great deal.

But yeah I mean, knock a few orders of magntitude off the Death Star firepower, and that 1E38 joules figure IIRC does not account for the explody-ring, and it's still just stupid powerful. Scaling might even work in favor of smaller weapons, not bigger ones, though that is unlikely.

"This cult of special forces is as sensible as to form a Royal Corps of Tree Climbers and say that no soldier who does not wear its green hat with a bunch of oak leaves stuck in it should be expected to climb a tree"
— Field Marshal William Slim 1956

Pro-Wars Fodder
1: "Single Reactor Ignition" Shot can now be quanified, arguably the DS2 used the same gimmick at Endor
2: Hyperspace travel times have more corroborating circumstantial data
3: An Imperator MKI's shields can take multiple +100 meter objects accelerating to Hyperspace, no damage
4: Planetary Shields are now, Academic

Pro-Trek Fodder
1: Rebel Airstrike is rather abysmal (on par with a Borg Sphere bombardment of a leanto)
2: A Star Destroyer can be shredded like paper mache if collided with an object of comparable mass (accelerated in the ballpark of ~3,000g)
3: Imperial Planetary Shields appear to require an exposed orbital control station...requiring a mass comparable to two Imperator MKI's to destroy, Rebel fleet is incapable of parlaying the force on it's own...in a prolonged engagement.

FedRebel wrote:
3: Imperial Planetary Shields appear to require an exposed orbital control station...requiring a mass comparable to two Imperator MKI's to destroy, Rebel fleet is incapable of parlaying the force on it's own...in a prolonged engagement.

They don't actually require this to operate. They require this to be able to open a hole in the shield without turning off the entire system. When they retract the gate, it likely would require that they cycle the shield entirely to reactivate it. It is likely equivalent to something like the scram protocol on a nuclear reactor, in which it takes a great deal of effort to get it working properly again, which is why they only do this after X-wings are already flying through the gate.

The shield over Endor has no such weakness. It instead relies on precise timing with respect to opening and closing the shield, as the Empire obviously learned why shield gates were a bad idea over the one over Scarif gave the shield and easily exploitable weakness thanks to conservation of momentum. Because the gate is small relative to something like a star destroyer, it is relatively easy to push around and thus gives an easily exploitable weakness to the overall shield.

Something that occurred to me. Has anyone tried to figure out the distance that Baze was shooting all those Stormtroopers on top of that cliff on Eadu? I don't know much about modern firearms to compere but it looked pretty far to me with good accuracy for an automatic weapon if you ask me.

Baltar: "I don't want to miss a moment of the last Battlestar's destruction!"
Centurion: "Sir, I really think you should look at the other Battlestar."
Baltar: "What are you babbling about other...it's impossible!"
Centurion: "No. It is a Battlestar."

Corrax Entry 7:17: So you walk eternally through the shadow realms, standing against evil where all others falter. May your thirst for retribution never quench, may the blood on your sword never dry, and may we never need you again.

DarthPooky wrote:Something that occurred to me. Has anyone tried to figure out the distance that Baze was shooting all those Stormtroopers on top of that cliff on Eadu? I don't know much about modern firearms to compere but it looked pretty far to me with good accuracy for an automatic weapon if you ask me.

I seriously doubt it was all that good. Real machine guns have ranges in the hundreds of meters. Even the SAW with a rather minuscule 5.56mm round has a useful range of 800 meters.

Baze's weapon, without a stock and bipod, is unlikely to be able to match this, even though it also oddly has a scope.

The Romulan Republic wrote:The torpedo performance was embarrassing. By all rights, they should have been able to glass the base and everything for a few miles around with that one hit, going off of the old numbers. Unless we presume they were using weaker munitions to prevent collateral damage, which I suppose is possible.

They may have had some major political reasons to do that, though this would be rather iffy given the desire to kill a high value target they had no rational reason to think would be standing on the landing platform.

There could have been a communications mixup, or the plan could have been to suppress the defenses then drop a huge bomb to level the place (although that seems kind of silly). Or maybe they were hoping they could somehow evacuate their agent, which would mean nuking everything in the vicinity was contraindicated.

Literally the second half of the entire movie is about a group of Rebels basically deciding to tell their own command structure to go to hell, and doing the mission the way they think it ought to be done. And then the main body of the Rebel fleet backing them up, because HOPE!

Who knows how the X-Wings on Eadu decided to operate, no matter what the high command was telling them.

the interesting thing about Rogue 1 is that it introduces several elements that were previously non-canon. ion torpedoes, shield gates, hammerheads, to name a few. it kind of throws a wrench in continuity IMO since ion torpedoes were never seen in canon before or since that movie in the timeline. it does reveal a structural weak point in the ISDs. hit it on the side and the framework can take the blow but hit it in the superstructure on top and it goes to pieces. I do kinda wonder why the fleet didn't blow that ISD to shreds once it was disabled by the ion torpedoes. just one of many questions that the film raises.

texanmarauder wrote:it does reveal a structural weak point in the ISDs. hit it on the side and the framework can take the blow but hit it in the superstructure on top and it goes to pieces.

I believe fractal has theorised before that an ISD's main belt is internal, with the superstructure sitting on top of it. From my slightly hazy recollection of the film, the impacting ISD just scraped off the superstructure without significant damage to the main hull, which would support that theory.

I do kinda wonder why the fleet didn't blow that ISD to shreds once it was disabled by the ion torpedoes. just one of many questions that the film raises.

It was disabled. The other one wasn't, and the shield gate still needed to be broken through - they therefore had much more important things to shoot at.

Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe - Albert Einstein

If anyone feels like flaming some rabid Trekkies in the versus debate, Quora is full of them. It's pretty depressing.

Also, on the issue of torpedo output: while it is known that Star Wars weapons output energy on the scale of nuclear weapons, the blasts are far more focused. For the purposes of the vs debate, it simply means that a round from a Star Destroyer will punch straight through the Enterprise, rather than vaporize the whole ship. Point being, if the torpedoes seem underpowered, it's just that they are very high-powered in a very small spot.

Basically, how antitank weapons work. Someone from centuries ago might hypothesize that our penetrators are underpowered because they only damage a small portion of the tank. As we know, this is false, simply beause the tank is so strong it requires a massive amount of energy to pierce a single point. So Star Wars weapons blast megatons of energy into a small area so that they actually do damage. Eadu base may be so heavily armored that a mile-wide blast would have dealt no damage to the base, just the landscape.

Just my two cents.

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--Mace

The Old Testament has as much validity for the foundation of a religion as the pattern my recent case of insect bites formed on my ass.
--Solauren

KraytKing wrote:The Alliance is small. Those may have been anti-ship bombs, simply because any anti-infantry bombs they could afford were halfway across the galaxy.

And yes, I am explaining the lack of massive firepower. It is an accepted fact that Star Wars weapons deal damage on a nuclear scale. Is there anything wrong with my points?

The things wrong is what I just pointed out. You're working back from the conclusion you want. Not forward from the evidence. Do any of the other incidences of warheads being used match that theory at all? They tend to create big booms when used in other places in the franchise. Even anti-ship roles like against Executor and the DSII reactor.

It's not just the warheads if the fighters had the firepower they're 'supposed' to have. Then they could have literally vapourised everyone on that platform with a single blast. They didn't so they are either incompetent or incapable.

To the brave passengers and crew of the Kobayashi Maru... sucks to be you - Peter David